Stile Antico Josquin

Boston Early Music Festival in partnership with The Morgan Library & Museum present Stile Antico Josquin: Father of the Renaissance Ave Maria…virgo serena Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521) Kyrie from Missa Pange lingua Josquin Vivrai je tousjours Josquin El grillo Josquin Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria Josquin Gloria from Missa Pange lingua Josquin Mille regretz Josquin Salve regina a5 Josquin O mors inevitabilis Hieronymus Vinders (fl. ca. 1525) Agnus Dei I and III from Missa Pange lingua Josquin Dum vastos Adriae fluctus Jacquet de Mantua (1483–1559) Friday, February 26, 2021 at 8pm Livestream broadcast Filmed concert from All Saints Church, West Dulwich, London, England BEMF.org Stile Antico Helen Ashby, Kate Ashby, Rebecca Hickey, soprano Emma Ashby, Cara Curran, Eleanor Harries, alto Andrew Griffiths, Jonathan Hanley, Benedict Hymas, tenor James Arthur, Will Dawes, Nathan Harrison, bass This concert is organized with the cooperation of Knudsen Productions, LLC, exclusive North American artist representative of Stile Antico. Stile Antico records for Decca. PROGRAM NOTES Our program tonight is devoted to the wonderful music of Josquin des Prez, marking 500 years since his death in 1521. Josquin was unquestionably a star in his own time: no lesser figure than Martin Luther praised him as “the master of the notes,” while for the theorist Glarean, “no one has more effectively expressed the passions of the soul in music…his talent is beyond description.” So what is it about Josquin that exerted such a spell on the generations that followed—and which still speaks so eloquently to us today? Much about Josquin’s biography and career remains shadowy: it isn’t always possible to pin down where he was working, and—with a few exceptions—the chronology of his works can only be attempted on stylistic grounds. Even his full name (Josquin Lebloitte, dit “des Prez”) and birthdate (ca. 1450) were until recently the subject of some doubt. Born in what is now the far north of France, he sang as a boy (alongside the composer Jean Mouton) at Saint-Quentin. In 1477 he is listed as a singer at the court of Duke René of Anjou at Avignon; it’s possible that he was transferred from there to Paris in 1481, in which case he would have sung at the Sainte Chapelle. After that he seems to have been in the service of the Sforza family in Milan, and in 1489 he joined the choir of the Papal Chapel in Rome, singing in the Sistine Chapel until 1494 or 1495. His next move is again unclear—he may have returned to Sforza service, or worked at the French court—and we find him next briefly in the service of Duke Ercole I d’Este at Ferrara in 1503 and 1504. He then returned to his native northern France, becoming Provost of the church of Notre Dame at Condé-sur-L’Escaut, where he remained until his death on August 27, 1521. Much clearer is that Josquin’s music was held in the highest esteem by his contemporaries. In 1502, Duke Ercole’s talent scouts wrote letters arguing both for and against his appointment in Ferrara: on the one hand, Girolamo de Sestola writes “I believe that there is neither lord nor king who will now have a better chapel than yours if Your Lordship sends for Josquin… I want to place a crown upon this chapel of ours.” On the other, Gian de Artiganova recommends the appointment of Heinrich Isaac instead: “It is true that Josquin composes better, but he composes when he wants to, and not when one wants him to, and he is asking 200 ducats in salary while Isaac will come for 120—but Your Lordship will decide.” That His Lordship decided in favor of Josquin, exorbitant salary notwithstanding, attests to his renown. The development of music printing, just then taking wing, did much to cement Josquin’s reputation. The Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci placed a work by Josquin at the head of each of his first four motet anthologies; his initial volume (Motetti A, 1502) gives pride of place to Ave Maria…virgo serena, which also opens tonight’s program. Petrucci also issued Josquin’s masses in three volumes, the first of which has the distinction of being the first-ever music publication devoted to a single composer. Manuscripts and prints from Germany to Italy to Spain attest to how widely his music was distributed during the middle years of the sixteenth century. Glarean, writing in 1543, holds him the equal of Virgil; Cosimo Bartoli, in 1567, places him on a par with Michelangelo. In the years after Josquin’s death, hundreds of works were hopefully—or unscrupulously—attributed to his pen, presumably because the association would help sell copies; the German editor Georg Forster, writing in 1540, reports “an eminent man” (quite possibly Luther again) commenting archly that “now that Josquin is dead, he is putting out more works than when he was alive!” And so to the music. Josquin’s style emerges out of what we might provocatively call a pre- Renaissance tradition: one which does not generally seek to appeal directly to our emotions via rhetoric or overt word-painting, but rather makes its effect through dazzling contrapuntal technique, and more abstract forms of structural device and symbolism. (This may be why some people find they connect more readily with the more straightforwardly rhetorical music of Victoria, Lassus, or Byrd: it seems to speak a language more familiar to the modern ear, and hence can more easily push our emotional buttons.) Josquin’s achievement was to fuse the technical and structural rigor which he inherited from the Franco-Flemish tradition (including his teacher Ockeghem) with the directness and simplicity of the music he encountered in Italy, achieving an amazing clarity and lucidity of style, of which Ave Maria…virgo serena is the quintessential example. Josquin’s preference for short points of imitation (snatches of melody, repeated by each voice part in turn) as a means of structuring longer spans of music was hugely influential, becoming the single most important organizing principle in the music of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. No longer was it necessary to structure a work around a pre-composed cantus firmus voice, as had been the fashion for centuries (though Josquin himself often still did so); instead, each new line of text could have its own point of imitation. This innovation allowed composers to respond far more nimbly to their texts, crafting each new point to capture its expressive nuance: a hallmark of the high Renaissance style, whose power is founded above all on contrast, color, and constant sensitivity to the possibilities of word-painting, rather than on abstract structural techniques. Josquin himself often combined both approaches, employing a large-scale structural device as well as smaller-scale imitation and contrast. The remarkable Salve regina a5 is an excellent example: one of the inner parts is entirely pre-composed, consisting exclusively of ostinato repetitions of the “Salve” motto at two different pitch levels, while the highest part is a close paraphrase of the well-known plainchant antiphon. Despite these twin constraints, Josquin manages to create a motet full of variety and color, by turns muscularly rhythmic and tenderly reflective. If the technical ingenuity of the Salve regina is relatively clear to the listener, then the inner workings of Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria are far less obvious. This meltingly lovely motet conceals a canon at the fifth between the second and fourth voices. In the first part, the two voices sing three breves apart; in the second part the gap reduces to two breves, and in the third part, it is just one breve. The ear, however, is not drawn to this structural trickery, but rather to the gently affectionate lines of the polyphony, and in particularly to the beautiful falling melismas at the opening, seeming to clothe the figure of the Virgin in sumptuous musical robes. Running as a thread through our program are excerpts from the celebrated Missa Pange lingua. Believed to be Josquin’s last setting of the Mass Ordinary—it is the only one not to appear in Petrucci’s volumes, placing it after 1514—it finds Josquin at his most fluent and sophisticated. The mass is based on the well-known plainsong hymn Pange lingua gloriosi with words by Thomas Aquinas (better known in English as ‘Sing, my tongue, the Savior’s glory’). Rather than treating the melody as a cantus firmus in the old-fashioned manner, Josquin mines it as an endless source of melodic inspiration. Only in the final Agnus Dei III do we hear the entire melody, placed ostentatiously in long notes at the top of the texture. The effect is curiously cathartic, as though the listener, having been “teased” throughout, is finally allowed to enjoy the hymn fully unfurled. In addition to his music for the church, Josquin was prolific in the secular forms, and our program includes three such works. The famous El grillo (‘The Cricket’), is a light-hearted frottola—an Italian form characterized by simple textures and clarity of declamation; it probably dates from Josquin’s Milanese years. Similarly well-known is the plangent Mille regretz, a French-language chanson which became a favorite of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Despite the fame of these works, their attribution to Josquin has been questioned; still less secure is that of Vivrai je tousjours, which appears only in one source from the 1540s. Authentic or not, this expressive chanson about frustrated love is well deserving of an audience.

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